Not many teachers can be evaluated using state test scores

School districts across Washington state are starting to evaluate teachers and principals in new, more rigorous ways. Not surprisingly, that’s not easy.

Rather than simply rating teachers and principals as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, districts are using a four-level scale and, for the first time, must include student academic growth as a significant part of those evaluations.

Just how to do that well? A panel last week at the University of Washington made it clear that question is far from settled.

There’s wide agreement that student learning should be part of teacher and principal evaluations, and that such growth can’t be measured by any one test. The question is: What should be part of the equation? Classroom assignments/tests? District ones? State exams given at the end of a school year? And how much weight should any of these receive?

Two of the four panelists — Chris Korsmo of the League of Education Voters and Justin Fox-Bailey, a Snohomish teacher and executive committee member at the state’s largest teachers union — covered all the usual arguments about whether state test scores should play a role in measuring student growth.

Korsmo argued that state test scores, while imperfect measures of teacher quality, have value and their use can be refined over time. Fox-Bailey questioned whether they are valid and reliable enough to be used at all.

Joe Willhoft offered a peek into the future, when tests will be more sophisticated, but he also said he thought using a mix of measures would be prudent. (He is the executive director of a consortium of states that are developing tests tied to the Common Core, a new set of learning standards that Washington and most other states are starting to use.)

But it was Michaela Miller, who formerly worked on teacher evaluation at the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, who brought up one of the often-overlooked concerns when it comes to state tests — that the vast majority of Washington teachers don’t teach grades or subjects that are covered by them.

Stories in the series

When tackling the topic of student discipline, some of the country’s toughest schools have done a turnaround. Instead of focusing on rules broken, they now ask kids to confront themselves. The result? Fewer suspensions and new perspective on the point of school itself. Read the story →

It stands to reason: Kick troubled students out of school and they often come back even worse. The Kent School District is trying to tackle this national problem by overhauling the way it handles discipline. But its answers spark even more questions. Read the story →

In an idea borrowed from college athletics, the University of Washington boosts promising engineering students — many of them women and minorities — with an extra year of academic work. Read the story →

Boosting the quality of preschool in Seattle could help children, and the city as a whole. A number of studies, including one from the ’60s, establish that potential. But there is no guarantee of success. Read the story →

Universal, free preschool in Tulsa, Okla., has produced results attracting national attention, and could be a blueprint for Seattle. But after 16 years the long-term outcomes raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read the story →

Communication failures both within Seattle Public Schools and with parents of children with disabilities continue to undermine the district’s efforts to fix longstanding problems in special education. Read the story →

A new focus on individualized advice and counseling, boosted by software tools, is helping hundreds more students earn degrees and certificates each year at Walla Walla Community College. Read the story →

The path to college often leaves disadvantaged students behind. Two unusual nonprofits, one based in Seattle, have helped vault thousands of low-income students onto university campuses. Read the story →

In an attempt to add depth to the curriculum in America's most popular advanced high-school courses, some local teachers threw out most of their lectures and replaced them with a series of projects. Results so far are encouraging. Read the story →

Western Washington University college students are working as mentors, tutors and role models for thousands of K-12 students in and around Bellingham. The goal: convince them that college should be part of their educational trajectory. Read the story →

Kent educators combed through transcripts and discovered 2,600 young people in their district without any kind of diploma or credential. Enter iGrad, a program linking dropouts with college, that has been flooded with kids who want a second chance. Read the story →

A community group in northwest Chicago has turned hundreds of hesitant parents into capable classroom helpers, role models and leaders by tapping into strengths many don't realize they have. Read the story →

Missing just a few days of class in sixth grade can predict whether you'll graduate from high school. That research powers a national anti-dropout effort that's making a difference at Seattle's Aki Kurose and Denny International middle schools. Read the story →

For years, students at White Center Heights Elementary logged some of the lowest test scores in King County. Then teachers tried something new, and the numbers soared by double-digits after just one year. So what happened, and could it be replicated elsewhere? Read the story →

About the authors

John Higgins is one of Education Lab's reporters. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2012 to 2013.

Katherine Long has been a reporter for The Seattle Times since 1990, focusing for the past three years on higher ed, with stories that have ranged from the complexities of prepaid tuition programs to nontraditional ways to earn a degree.

Claudia Rowe joined The Seattle Times’ reporting staff in 2013. She has written about education for The New York Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, among other publications.

Leah Todd is an education reporter at The Times. She previously covered education for the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming.

Mike Siegel has been a news photographer at the Seattle Times since 1987. His photography was used in a series titled "Methadone and the Politics of Pain," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for investigative reporting.

Linda Shaw is The Times’ education editor. Previously, she covered public education as a reporter at The Seattle Times for more than two decades. Her coverage has won numerous national and local awards and honors.

Caitlin Moran is community engagement editor for Education Lab. She came to The Times from Patch, where she spent three years managing hyperlocal news websites on the Eastside.

About Solutions Journalism Network

The Education Lab project is being done with the support of the Solutions Journalism Network. SJN is a non-profit organization created to legitimize and spread the practice of solutions journalism: rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.